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A Little Less Paradox, Please: A Review of The Paradoxical Vision by Robert Benne

Thomas D. Kennedy

03/01/2005

[1] On Sunday, January 20, 2005, three days after the
"Report and Recommendations" of the task force for the ELCA Studies
on Sexuality was released, there was no mention of the report, no
notice in our bulletin, at my local church. In this respect, our
response to this report was no different from our response to the
2003 social statement on health and healthcare, Caring for
Health: Our Shared Endeavor, or any of the seven earlier
social statements of the ELCA. Or any of the eleven messages the
church has adopted. The church's social statements and messages are
not on the congregation's radar. And I would guess that no one in
the congregation was aware of Bishop Mark Hanson's open letter to
presidential candidates Bush and Kerry or his statement following
the election (I, myself, have only just now discovered these
statements). When Higgins Rd. speaks, our church is frequently not
listening. In this respect we are probably not much different from
most other Lutheran congregations, or so it seems to me.

[2] My own response to this, to our failure to take note of what
our church and our presiding bishop are saying about public issues,
is similar to what I suspect would be the response of Robert
Benne-bemusement that our Bishop felt that the need to speak either
as a celebrity or on behalf of our church to the presidential
candidates, and sadness that when it comes to our public posture,
ELCA Lutherans are not being formed, apparently, by Lutheran
theology, though not necessarily sadness that we are paying no
attention to the particular messages and statements of the church
and the Church Council of the ELCA. Benne helpfully reminds us that
the church can speak too much, indeed, that the credibility of the
church's speech "increases as the frequency of church social
statements decreases" (207). Later, he adds "…the church
should speak only when it has something unique to offer from its
own theological-ethical heritage." And the same might be said of
the bishop. It's all very nice if he wants to let presidential
candidates know how he is feeling about the election-his voice is
no less relevant than that of Toby Keith, Bruce Springsteen, Alec
Baldwin, or Mel Gibson. But neither is it any more relevant,
especially given that both presidential candidates seemed to have a
tin ear for what their own church leaders-Catholic and
Methodist-were saying.

[3] What Benne would like and what I would like, however, is
Lutheran Christians with a genuinely Christian public theology,
Christians whose public activities are informed by their faith
tradition. The Christian tradition, including the Lutheran
expression of that tradition, does engage the public realm, does
(and should) matter in our interpretation of the public world and
may, perhaps, matter in persuading the world of how things ought to
be and how things ought to go in the public spheres of life. This
is the work of Christian public theology, the practical engagement
of the Christian theological tradition (in one of its expressions)
with the public world.

[4] But Benne is not interested in each and every Christian
public theology; he goes some distance in pointing out the most
prominent way in which American Christians have gone wrong before
he develops his own Lutheran public theology. Calvinism (or,
"a particular kind of Calvinism") has decisively shaped the
American experience, Benne argues following the (crypto-Lutheran)
Calvinist Mark Noll. A strong doctrine of sanctification and the
confidence that the Holy Spirit enables us to discern and do God's
will has led American Christians to believe that God wills to
transform society, with us as God's agents, in the same way that
God has transformed the individual soul. However, as America has
become increasingly secularized (although apparently not quite so
secularized as Benne thought a decade ago when the book was
published), "the substance but not the form of public activity" has
changed. Americans remain confident that we can reform and
transform public life, but it is the spirit of science and
technology that now guides us.

[5] Against this Calvinism in both its religious and secularized
forms, Benne maintains that "the Lutheran paradoxical vision
provides a valuable, if not indispensable framework for any
adequate Christian public theology" (62), that the paradoxical
vision deserves more public attention than it has received, and
that this vision is well-represented and has been influential in
the public arena in the work of three (noticeably non-Lutheran)
public theologians-Reinhold Niebuhr, Glenn Tinder, and Richard John
Neuhaus.

[6] The framework provided by the Lutheran paradoxical vision-a
framework within which one may be either politically conservative
or liberal-is summarized in four theological themes: (1) The
qualitative distinction between God's salvation and all human
efforts with an emphasis upon the radicality and universality of
the Gospel; (2) The paradox of human nature with the understanding
of Christians simultaneously sinners and redeemed; (3) God's
paradoxical rule in which God is active in the lives of Christians
and in the church in a way fundamentally different from God's
active rule in the world; (4) The paradox of history in which the
kingdom of God is even now present, but not fully present,
awaiting, as it does, God's completion of what has begun.

[7] What this framework should lead us to, Benne argues, is a
humbler, less ambitious-even diffident-public engagement, a public
engagement with the world that expects human mistakes and failures
in our political activities even as we are confident that God has
given us all that we need to carry on a tolerable public life
together. What Christians should aim for, in other words, is
not Geneva, but Lake Woebegon-a pretty good place to raise the
kids.

[8] Perhaps the most valuable contribution Benne makes appears
in his discussion of the qualitative difference between what God is
up to and our own human efforts. Benne argues that while God may be
an expert on everything, the church isn't, and he proposes that we
think of the church's special competence in terms of a series of
concentric circles. At the center lies the church's core vision:
the event of Jesus as Christ; the witness of the Bible and the
tradition to Christ; the key teachings (summarized in the
ecumenical creeds) interpreting and preserving the church's
understanding of that event; and the central moral vision of the
Christian faith: The Ten Commandments, the calling of all
Christians to faith active in love and justice, the preciousness of
all created life redeemed by Christ, and the covenantal structure
of God's creation (which includes the special covenant of man and
woman in marriage)…."

[9] The church's authority diminishes as it moves further from
this center. Thus, in the second of Benne's circles, as the church
interprets the core and applies the core to challenges in the
world, the church can speak more clearly and with greater boldness
than in the third circle as the church attempts to translate its
vision into public policy in terms of specific recommendations for
legislation. The church may have a deep commitment to an equal
access to a good education for all children as a demand of a decent
civil order, but possesses no special competence to address the
question of the best means for delivering a good education. The
church must denounce as inappropriate any demands (de jure or
de facto) that Christian children leave their faith at the
door as they enter the classroom, but Christians may disagree about
the best means for educating their children.

[10] Although I am most appreciative of The Paradoxical
Vision and generally sympathetic to Benne's framework for
public theology, I want to make two claims about Benne's public
theology. First, the paradoxical vision is best understood as a
reforming vision, a corrective vision, and
inherent in that vision is the potential to do great harm if the
vision is not held simultaneously with the understanding it aims to
correct. Secondly, the public theology of the paradoxical vision is
more helpful for groups than for individuals, for a church, rather
than for Christians, given that individuals are less likely than
groups to be tempted to make the mistakes the paradoxical vision
adeptly corrects. These two points could be made
historically-identifying the trends and movements to which Reinhold
Niebuhr, Glenn Tinder, and Richard John Neuhaus respond-or
conceptually. I shall make the argument conceptually.

[11] Lutherans are, as a rule, underachievers, and the themes of
Benne's paradoxical vision explain why this is the case. So worried
are we about taking our own efforts too seriously, about confusing
what we may accomplish with what God is accomplishing, that we aim
lower than we might. We build pretty good groceries and
pretty good universities, lest by aiming at excellence we overlook
the qualitative distinction. We elevate humility to chief of the
virtues, lest we rely upon our own understandings and efforts.
These are understandable responses to one human tendency-hubris-but
Christians do not believe pride to be the only vice, and Christians
do believe that the darkness of the human soul is such that pride
can manifest itself in many different guises, one of them the guise
of humility that refuses to let the Creator re-make the Christian
into a new creation.

[12] Justified, yet sinners, we remain a little lower than the
angels, crowned with glory and honor. There is, of course, a risk
of treating ourselves as transcendent creatures, equal to God, and
many are the contemporary proposals that, in their failure to take
seriously our embodiment, make this mistake. But, although the
paradoxical vision helpfully reminds us of our dual characters-as
justified yet sinner, as transcendent yet finite-its psychological
impact, more often than not, is to justify our aiming low, at
failing to recognize the ongoing work of God in preparing us for
community with God.

[13] And the arena in which Lutherans tend to aim lowest is that
of the left hand rule of God. There is, to say the least, a tension
between the implications of Benne's second theme and his third
theme. If even Christians remain sinners and if that sin manifests
itself in every aspect of our lives, we might conclude that it is
hard for even Christians to know what we ought to know about
properly ordering our lives together. Benne, however, in his
unpacking of God's left-hand rule is inordinately confident of the
human ability to will and do the good. "Secular persons, with their
capacities for civic righteousness, can work behind the mask of God
to promote his law." Now on the one hand, Benne is certainly
correct to emphasize that God can accomplish justice, peace, and
order through persons who know nothing of God or God's plans.
As such, Christians should be happy to find political allies
wherever we may find them. But, given the radical nature of sin,
given that sin goes all the way down, Benne's confidence that
Christians and non-Christians alike can identify and agree upon the
ordering of our life together in the polis appears more like
Enlightenment rationalism than Christian theology. So, on the one
hand, Christians may know things about the nature and meaning of
sex that it would be good for everyone to know, and may make common
cause with non-Christians in political legislation on these issues
as a result of our culture's continuing to live on the borrowed
capital of Christian culture. But, on the other hand, we shouldn't
find it at all surprising if notions of fidelity and chastity that
are not uniquely Christian can in certain times and places gain
absolutely no foothold.

[14] Benne's paradoxical vision corrects the Christian tendency
to claim an essentially secular political movement or agenda as
profoundly Christian. But it, too, needs the correcting vision of
the Christian understanding of a God still at work in the world,
eager to accomplish justice, pouring out upon all a grace that
testifies to God's beauty and excellence and a future of hope.
Pouring out upon all a grace that, perhaps, only Christians can
recognize as grace, a grace sometimes resisted by all who would
benefit from it.

[15] This is not to deny that God may have different
expectations and may enable different accomplishments in the church
than in the world. But, if the way of the gospel really is a good
way for humans to live, then it is a good way for all humans to
live. And if Christians, by virtue of the faith that has been given
to them, glimpse this way, and recognize some ways in the world
more in sync with it than others, it is no mistake for them as
Christians to advance these ways-though it would be a mistake to
baptize them as Christian-mindful that only God will finally usher
in his completed.

[16] So I do not disagree with Benne that the paradoxical vision
is indispensable, but I do want to affirm that it is parasitic upon
an equally rich and robust theological understanding of political
engagement, an understanding that while remaining clearly
Christocentric, as is Benne's understanding, may be more profoundly
Trinitarian, attending to the internal relations of the Trinity and
God's redemptive purposes throughout human history, purposes, to be
sure, effected and achieved in the incarnation, crucifixion, and
resurrection of Christ, and made manifest most clearly in his life
and the testimony to it.

[17] I have suggested that Benne's paradoxical vision may be
especially salutary and helpful as a corrective of the political
engagement of churches who take themselves too seriously, who
mistakenly assume that they have a word and that the coming of the
kingdom of God requires their word on every major political issue,
and I have argued that the paradoxical vision is, indeed, salutary,
insofar as it is regarded not as a replacement for, but as
corrective of, a richer, more robust political theology. In
conclusion, I want to suggest that what the church in America
currently needs is for its bureaucracies to heed the paradoxical
vision even as individuals within the church are taught that
richer, more robust political theology. The grounds for this are,
briefly, that in our current context it is hard for individuals to
take themselves too seriously, but easy for groups to do so, hard
for individuals to recognize their own extraordinary value, but
easy for groups to inflate their significance.

[18] At this point I can do little more than hand-wave, but
suffice it to say that, after Darwin, after globalization, it is
hard for any of us to think of ourselves as terribly significant in
the grand scheme of things. One corrupt reading of the paradoxical
vision-not Benne's, to be sure-would so emphasize the qualitative
distinction between what God does and what we do that our status as
those God deemed worthy of his sacrificial love is completely
occluded. God's redemptive activity so occupies center-stage that
the point of that activity, the end of God's activity-the communion
of God and those who bear God's image-is lost from sight. And that
oversight is reinforced in a cultural context that suggests that we
are meaningless surds. Better that the church should teach us that
we are made for God and are being re-made so that we may be worthy
of that fellowship, that what we do even now is critical as a part
of that process of re-making and as a part of the reverence we owe
to others who, like us, are called to this fellowship with God.
Robert Benne's unpacking of the paradoxical vision, happily, is not
an odds with this picture, and for his sensitive and lucid
unpacking of this corrective vision we can be grateful.

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